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When Abbott Elementary made its debut as a midseason replacement in early January (after an initial preview in December), it arrived without much fanfare. It didn’t take long, however, for word to spread that this ABC sitcom—which, as of April, had scored a rare 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes (it has since dropped down to a 98% rating)—was something special. Created by and starring Quinta Brunson (A Black Lady Sketch Show, Miracle Workers), Abbott Elementary is a feel-good mockumentary in the vein of Parks and Recreation.

The series is set at a Philadelphia public school where, like so many real-life public schools, funding is fairly nonexistent, leading the school district’s powers-that-be to feel just fine about delivering the bare minimum to their students. Fortunately, Willard R. Abbott Elementary School’s faculty — including Brunson as second grade teacher Janine Teagues and the always-amazing Sheryl Lee Ralph as Barbara Howard, the school’s kindergarten teacher and a kind of mentor to Janine — are so passionate about their jobs that they’re not about to let a little thing like a lack of money rob their students of a proper education.

While Abbott Elementary is easily classified as a comedy, it’s also not afraid to challenge the status quo and tackle genuine issues facing America’s public school system, especially in underfunded cities. The series has already earned an Emmy for Outstanding Casting for a Comedy Series for its first season, and will compete for six more, including Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, and four acting awards, including an Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for Brunson and Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for Ralph.

When Will Abbott Elementary Season Two Premiere?

While fans of the series wait to see what additional Emmys the show might take home, they won’t have to wait much longer for its second season to drop. In March, as Elle reports, ABC announced that Abbott Elementary would be returning for a new school year, which is set to commence on Wednesday, September 21, 2022 at 9 p.m. ET. The new episode will be available to stream on Hulu the very next day.

Top-ranked Alabama found itself in serious trouble in Austin on Saturday afternoon, as Texas pushed them to the edge in what was a low-scoring, highly entertaining game.

Early on it looked like it might be a shootout, with Texas’ young star QB Quinn Ewers throwing for 134 yards in the opening quarter before leaving the game with a shoulder injury after a big hit to end it. After Texas finished off that drive with a touchdown to tie the game at 10-10, we didn’t see another touchdown until the fourth quarter. The Longhorns entered the red zone five times in the game and came away with just 16 points — one touchdown, three made field goals, and a missed 20-yarder to end the first half — and those struggles executing came back to haunt them (as did what looked like a safety that became an incompletion on a wild review).

Trailing 16-10 in the fourth and having gotten just 20 yards in their last 25 plays, Alabama’s offense finally got going on offense as Bryce Young, who struggled much of the day along with Bama receivers dropping passes, got in a rhythm. He capped that drive off with an incredible scramble drill pass to Jahmyr Gibbs, as the Georgia Tech transfer was Young’s most reliable target all day out of the backfield.

After a stop by the Bama defense, it looked like they’d salt the game away, but on a 4th and 1 in Texas territory, the Tide tried to run for it and got stuffed, giving the Longhorns life.

Texas would march down the field and faced 3rd and 3 when Will Anderson, the presumptive No. 1 pick in the 2023 NFL Draft who had a rough game to that point, came up with a huge sack to force a long field goal.

Still, Bert Auburn (incredible name, by the way) drilled it from 49 and put Texas up by two with just over a minute to play.

Young would again find Gibbs to move the ball into Texas territory, but the play of the game was an evaded sack by Young that would’ve forced Alabama into second and long from outside field goal range and may have forced them to use a timeout. Instead, Young spun under the sack from an unblocked defender and wheeled around the edge to get Alabama inside the 20 and firmly into field goal range.

After getting iced on his first make, Will Reichard, who was good from 52 earlier in the game, delivered the game-winning kick with 10 seconds left to spoil the upset and keep Alabama unblemished early in the season.

The Tide certainly won’t feel like they played well in the game, as they had 15 penalties for 100 yards and struggled to move the ball, but ultimately found their rhythm when they needed it late and got some big plays from Young. The pressure on Young early seemed to bother him, as he has a propensity for holding onto the ball too long, but his sense of urgency picked up late and the Tide offense started to move. Alabama’s defense wasn’t great against the pass, particularly when Ewers was able to stretch the field, but they were stingy per usual in the red zone and will certainly have things to work on going forward.

It’s a brutal loss for Texas considering the missed opportunities. Failing to score touchdowns from inside the 10, the safety that got wiped off the board will surely be a big talking point, and the Ewers injury will all be some major “what ifs” for the Longhorns going forward.

John Legend is not only a true showman; he also knows the key to women’s hearts. While downtempo R&B is ideal for romantic nights, it’s upbeat music that makes them feel alive at an energetic party. Flanked by women in sequined dresses and his backup singers, the “Green Light” artist performed “All She Wanna Do” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Though he stood in one place while belting into his microphone, Legend still managed to show off some of his dance moves. “I told her ‘You’re the love of my night / I won’t stop ’til you’re the love of my life / I won’t stop ’til you’re the one that I’m takin’ home / One I’ve been waitin’ for’,” Legend sang in the bridge as women danced around him.

John Legend’s visit to The Tonight Show came on the heels of the release of his double album Legend. His eighth full-length release features Rick Ross, JID, Saweetie, Jhene Aiko, Ty Dolla Sign, and more. Legend was preceded by “Dope,” “Honey,” and “All She Wanna Do.”

Check out John Legend’s performance of “All She Wanna Do” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon above.

Legend is out now via John Legend Music and Republic. Listen here.

Harrison Ford hasn’t always been exactly happy when it comes to dealing with fans. And no wonder: It can’t be easy being both Han Solo and Indiana Jones, to say nothing of Rick Deckard, Jack Ryan, Dr. Richard Kimble, and John Book. But at the D23 expo on Saturday, the famously grumpy screen legend got emotional when announcing that he really is done playing a certain archeologist and professor.

As per Deadline, Ford attended a presentation for Indiana Jones 5 (as it’s still perhaps tentatively called), joined by director James Mangold, producer Kathleen Kennedy, and fellow cast member Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Ford, who turned 80 in July, choked back tears as he talked up his final stint as the good Dr. Jones.

“I’m very proud to say that this one is fantastic, and this is one of the reasons,” he said, pointing to Waller-Bridge. “Indiana Jones movies are about mystery and adventure, but they’re also about heart, and I’m really, really happy that we have a really human story to tell, as well as a movie that will kick your ass.”

He then confirmed what was obvious to most. “This is it,” Ford told the crowd. “I will not fall down for you again.”

There was also a teaser, but that has yet to be made available online.

Ford has been playing Indy since 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was his second major franchise lead, after Han Solo, of course, cementing him as one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. The last time he essayed the role, in 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, was a box office success but earned considerably poorer reviews and a lackluster rep. But it has some fans, including no less than Quentin Tarantino.

(Via Deadline)

The Texas Longhorns entered Saturday’s game with top-ranked Alabama as three touchdown underdogs, but well into the second half it was clear that this would be anything but an easy day for the Crimson Tide.

Early on it was the young star Quinn Ewers giving Alabama problems as he racked up 134 yards passing in the first quarter before getting knocked out of the game with a shoulder injury late in the opening frame. After that, Texas punched it in from the goal line to tie the game and neither offense could do much more — with the exception of a late second quarter drive that ended in no points after a missed chip shot field goal — leaving the game tied at 10 into the third quarter.

That stalemate was nearly ended with a safety when Bryce Young was apparently sacked in the end zone, but a flag on the play hit Texas with a roughing the passer plus targeting, triggering a review. It was immediately clear that the call was terrible, as Young wasn’t even down with the player comes in and hits him, but as they reminded everyone multiple times, they can’t review the roughing, only the targeting. However, the review dragged on and they came to a unique conclusion that resulted in the safety coming off the board but Alabama not getting a first down.

The result of the lengthy review was to rule that Young was never down and threw the ball away for an incompletion — and because you can’t give a penalty after review, there couldn’t be a grounding call that would’ve resulted in a safety. As such, it was fourth down and Alabama punted it away, ultimately leading to three points for Texas on a field goal.

For the Longhorns, it was still a net positive but it was truly one of the most bizarre penalty calls and reviews that I have ever seen. The roughing call was laughable and Texas probably should’ve gotten two points and the ball with a chance for more, but despite the entire, head-scratching sequence they still ended up with the lead.

When last we saw the titular hero of The Mandalorian, he’d done something he’d never done before: He showed someone his face. But removing his helmet to bid adieu to Baby Yoda (sorry: Grogu) cost him. As the first teaser for Season 3 begins, Pedro Pascal’s nameless bounty hunter is asked whether he ever showed someone his visage. When he confesses that he did, he’s informed he can no longer be called a Mandalorian — which is a shame, because that’s the only name we have for him. Now what do we call him?

The teaser bowed at the D23 expo, which has debuted lots of Disney and Marvel news. A lot has changed since the previous season aired two years ago. The Star Wars-verse has expanded even further, with shows like The Book of Boba Fett and this summer’s Obi-Wan Kenobi. What’s more, one of the big supporting players, Gina Carano, went and mouthed off with anti-trans rhetoric, getting herself fired and deep-sixing a proposed spin-off for her character, Cara Dune. (At least Carano has bounced back, appearing in Breitbart’s highly questionable Hunter Biden movie.)

Meanwhile, D23 also saw a trailer for yet another Star Wars show: Andor, which follows the early days of Diego Luna’s Rebel spy Cassian Andor, which you can watch below.

The Mandalorian Season 3 premieres at an as-yet-disclosed time in 2023. You can watch the teaser above.

While watching a deceptively touching scene in Bros (Nicholas Stoller’s new comedy that just premiered here at the Toronto International Film Festival) between Billy Eichner’s Bobby and Luke Macfarlane’s Aaron – we see the two men, shirtless from the waist up, embracing in an intimate moment before the camera pans out to reveal both men are receiving oral sex from two additional men in the room – I couldn’t help but think, “I really can’t wait for Ted Cruz to accidentally see Bros.”

Look, other than the pandemic years, I have been at every TIFF since 2011. Bros premiered at the Princess of Wales theater on Friday night, one of those big majestic places with two balconies. I have seen a lot of movies in that place, and I’ve never experienced the amount of almost constant, uproarious laughter like I did with Bros. Now, there are probably a few reasons for this. Toronto doesn’t accept a lot of mainstream studio comedies produced by Judd Apatow. So, yes, it makes sense there was a lot more laughter last night for Bros then there was for, say, The Master in 2012. Also, after two years away (TIFF had a subdued, smaller festival in 2021) it just felt like people were ready to laugh in a huge theater like this. And they did. So much so that I probably missed 20 percent of the dialogue over the laughter.

I have a friend who I won’t name who often tells me of his exploits as a gay single man living in New York City. These stories often involve drugs, multiple men, and eventual frustration. (While listening to these stories, I often find myself feeling very, very square.) I’m not going to pretend I have any idea what I’m talking about in that respect, but Bros very much captures the spirit of almost every story my friend has told me. And I’ve never really felt like that before. My friend’s stories are never really about serious subjects like wrestling about one’s identity (obviously important topics), they are almost always about orgies. Bros captures this in a way I’m not sure any studio movie has done before. (More on this in a bit.)

Bobby (Eichner) is a successful man living in New York City who is trying to raise money for a LGBTQ museum, but, alas, he can’t find love and is tired of seeing the same faces and impersonal hookups day after day on Grindr. (There are a lot of scenes of Eichner sending and receiving messages that just say, “Hey, what’s up?”) At a party, he spots Aaron (Macfarlane) an impossibly handsome man who loves Garth Brooks and would be more into talking about a Patriots game than hearing about a new museum opening. The two have an on again, off again, on again relationship that, at its core, follows the same traditional tropes of most romantic comedies, except there are a lot more scenes of men having sex with each other than, let’s say, the average moviegoer might be used to seeing. Trouble arises when Aaron runs into an old high school buddy, with his female fiancee, that Aaron used to have a crush on back in the day. In following days after, that friend comes out, which sets up a love triangle. Well, technically two love triangles. The one the three men make in bed together, then the much more complicated emotional love triangle that Bobby has more and more a problem with. Will these two finally get together in the end? We all kind of know what will happen, the concept here doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s just a much different-looking tire around that wheel.

Here’s a weird complaint, Bros might be too funny. I do wonder if Stoller and team were worried about how all this will play in some of the redder parts of the United States and decided to divert attention away from some of the steamier scenes with a nonstop brigade of jokes. In that there’s really not that much time to process a situation in a, “Oh wow, they showed that,” which will be immediately followed by Eichner being attacked by a bee. It really is joke after joke after joke, most delivered wonderfully by Eichner. And they sure landed in front of this big audience, but I do wonder how all that will play in a more subdued environment.

Bros is kind of positioning itself as a “first” in a lot of categories for a romantic comedy that centers on a relationship between two gay men. I have no idea what of that is true and what of that isn’t, but I do think it’s noteworthy a huge studio, Universal, is going to be putting Bros in thousands of theaters. I don’t know if this is “monumental,” or “well, it’s about time” or a combination of the two (probably a combination of the two), but it all does seem, at the very least, noteworthy.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

The passing of Queen Elizabeth II has inspired countless memoriams, including a confusing one from onetime monarch critic Johnny Rotten. But she — and the monarchy — remain controversial. Among the social media detritus to surface in the wake of her death was a video of Anthony Bourdain from 2018, in which the late chef and globetrotter made one hell of a face when someone he was dining with toasting the queen.

The clip was from Season 11, Episode 3 of Parts Unknown, which aired in 2018 and found Bourdain wandering about Newfoundland. It finds him in Raymond’s Restaurant in St. John’s, at a table with fellow chefs David McMillan and Frédéric Morin, about to casually enjoy some white wine.

Alas, one of Bourdain’s fellow diners makes a faux pas, at least in his eyes, uttering the words, “To the queen.” The toast causes Bourdain to pause, slowly put down his drink, and treat the toaster to some serious side-eye. He then says, “No, I hate the aristocracy, man.”

The clip was shared by multiple people, racking up hundreds of thousands of likes each. It’s a reminder that not only was Queen Elizabeth II far from infallible, but that Bourdain was never afraid to speak his mind, even when sitting down for a nice dinner with colleagues.

(Via Newsweek)

Quinn Ewers made quite the impression early in his biggest game of his young college career on Saturday, as the Texas star made some sensational throws in the first quarter against Alabama.

The Longhorns trailed 10-3 after the first quarter but were knocking on the doorstep of tying it up thanks to an absolute bomb from Ewers to Xavier Worthy, who dropped a touchdown on a similar ball from Ewers on their opening drive.

All told, Ewers piled up 134 yards on 9-of-12 passing in the first 15 minutes of action, and really should’ve had at least one touchdown had it not been dropped. However, on the play immediately following his deep ball to Worthy, Ewers was planted into the ground by Dallas Turner as he threw the ball away and landed directly on his left shoulder, staying down in significant pain afterwards.

Turner was flagged for driving Ewers into the ground, which is among the points of emphasis in college football for roughing the passer, but it wasn’t a dirty or late hit by any stretch, just an unfortunate one particularly with how Ewers ended up spinning and landing directly on that shoulder.

Ewers would eventually get up and walk to the sidelines where he was evaluated and then walked back to the locker room with a towel over his head. Sophomore Hudson Card came in for Ewers and on the first play of the second quarter, handed it off to star back Bijan Robinson for the game-tying touchdown. However, considering how much of the Longhorns offensive success early came from Ewers throwing the ball and pushing it downfield, his absence is a significant concern for Texas not just in this game but potentially long term as we await official word on the severity of the injury.

When Russian forces invaded Ukraine in late February, many predicted a swift victory. That didn’t happen. Over the last six months-plus, the aggressor nation has faced untold defeats, faced untold sanctions, even had to rehab big businesses that no longer wanted anything to do with them. Throughout, Russian state TV has tried to put a positive spin on things, but now even they seem to have given up.

As per The Daily Beast, Russian propagandists have started admitting that things aren’t exactly on the up-and-up. One common thread is that Russian soldiers are facing a threat bolstered by Western weaponry and foreign intel.

“We wish courage to our warriors, who are indeed doing very important work,” said 60 Minutes host Evgeny Popov, adding, “they are resisting an enormous horde that has been trained in the West.”

Meanwhilem, retired lieutenant-general Evgeny Buzhinsky asserted that Americans are amping up Ukrainian forces. “There are not only advisers, but specialists,” Buzhinsky declared. “I think that there are thousands of American advisers and specialists on the ground in Ukraine, they’re probably present in every unit.”

Then there’s Vladimir Solovyov, host of the radio show Full Contact. “I’m worried,” he brooded. “Naturally, we want for our guys to crush [the other side] and only to advance, but life doesn’t work that way.”

On the nightly program The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, military expert Mikhail Onufrienko was even more pessimistic. “This is a difficult war, it’s a big war, the world hasn’t seen wars of this magnitude since WWII, at least after Vietnam,” Onufrienko said. “The panic is being stoked not by the Ukrainian side, not by the Kyiv regime or Western sources, but by our own patriotic [social media] channels… Nonetheless, objectively speaking, this is the most successful advance of the junta since February 24… We clearly don’t have enough troops to contain them… but they couldn’t take Balakliya.”

They have reason to worry. As per Reuters, Ukrainian forces late last week reclaimed Kharkiv, a territory in the east previously occupied by now-crumbling Russian forces. The same happened with Izyum, also in the northeast, according to The New York Times. This may be a turning point in the world — good for Ukraine, not so good for Russia, or for Tucker Carlson.

(Via The Daily Beast)